UNRAVELED ~ STEVE ROGERS [3]

Chapter Twenty-Two

STEVE

There are few things Steve doesn't like to talk about, and one of them is Siberia.

The moments after he left Keight in the rubble were difficult to talk about, and hard to think about. He wanted to tell the details. He wanted to be through. But it hurt, like a knife to the chest, when he thought about what he had lost.

When Tony showed up in the bunker, he was suspicious. Why shouldn't he be? It could have been another play from Ross, to capture them. and he didn't ask about Keight, and Tony didn't say a word. Which for Steve, only made the worst case scenario even more possible.

Zemo. That was his name, the man who had created all this, set events into motion so that they would end up there, in Siberia, in that place with the other weapons of HYDRA's tyranny. Despite their differences, Steve thought he and Tony could work together again, maybe for the last time.

When he saw the bodies of the other Winter Soldiers shot dead with a clean bullet to the head, he knew they had been lured into a trap.

He hadn't known for sure that Bucky had killed Tony's parents. He had his theories, of course, and the video footage confirmed it. The guilt was oblivion, eating up his insides. Was that how Keight had felt, all that time? No, he wouldn't think about her. He couldn't.

He should have told Tony what he thought. They weren't his parents. It had been his duty as a friend to tell him, and now, Tony would never forgive him.

And then Zemo showed other footage, taken on a body camera, of a dark night on the borders of Wakanda. A young girl, with white blonde hair, her brown eyes wide with fear, tears dripping down her face as her back was slashed with a whip, and the cold face of the Winter Soldier as he continued to do what he was told while Pierce screamed questions at her, questions she refused to answer.

Bucky was torn apart, knowing who she was and what he had done to her. And if it wasn't enough that Bucky had killed his parents, seeing him inflict such pain onto a girl he thought of as family, as a daughter, now he was more than angry. He was fuming with grief and pain.

But seeing his best friend kill Howard Stark, a man who had been his friend, his help, even if it wasn't for that long, felt a like going into the ice all over again. It was chilling, seeing for himself the kind of damage Bucky had done, to Keight and to others and to himself.

He thought that's what made him so angry. There was guilt about Tony and there was grief about Keight and he didn't even know if she was alive. And combined with Tony's rage, and his consuming grief it made the atmosphere crackle with tension and it broke.

They could have taken him down, Bucky and him. But Tony was much smarter than he was, and for all his strength, it was the brains that made the victory possible.

Yet seeing him break Bucky's arm, that was the last straw.

Tony might have had the brains, but he had the skill and when it came down to it be could have done it.

But something stopped him, like a tether. Despite the shattered trust, despite the pain and the hurt, Tony was still family.

And you don't hurt family.

Tony said he didn't deserve the shield.

He didn't.

But Tony thought that being Captain America, that being an Avenger was all that mattered to him, was everything to him.

If that's what he thought, he didn't know Steve as well as he thought he did.

Bucky and Keight, and Sam and Wanda, and all the others he had left behind, they were everything to him.